Saturday, October 04, 2008

RCGI Seasonal Salon: Fall Equinox Issue

Three articles comprise this Fall Equinox issue of Seasonal Salon, produced by the Re-Formed Congregation of the Goddess-International.

In "Over Her Dead Body" Bellezza Squillace tells why she "adopted" a gravesite as part of a preservation process of a very old cemetary.

"Abuk, Dinka Goddess of Creative Abundance," by Patricia Monaghan, focuses on mythology from the African Sudan. The stories tell how Abuk, the "primal woman," kept humanity from starving, brought abundance, and more, including some rather humorous (at least to me) sexual myths.

Max Dashu begins "Searching for Diana" by connecting the autumn season with "a culture of women's freedom," and discussing Sarah Palin as well as the Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC (I agree--don't miss the terrific Maddow at 9 pm ET weeknights!). Dashu continues by discussing the current "astrological weather" and "economic uncertainty, and then segues into scholarship about the Goddess Diana in a variety of time periods and cultures. In a statement that may throw light on some current fundamentalist Christian groups' conflating of several different goddesses with Diana, Dashu writes:

...somehow it was Diana who emerged in late antiquity as the quintessential pagan goddess that the Christian clergy were desperate to stamp out. Through a process of giving Roman names to everything, what scholars call the interpretatio romana, all other goddess came to be conflated under the name of Diana.... It was Diana, too, who was said to lead hosts of spirits and women on shamanic flights through the night skies. The origins of this tradition in late Roman times, and their transmission through the early middle ages are most obscure and difficult to track.... We know this much: by the ninth century, Frankish bishops were denouncing beliefs in Diana as a goddess of the witches, eager to stamp them out as "an illusion of the devil." So Diana shines in the darkness, in the foundational myth of the European witch tradition.

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